Facebook acquired the Parse platform back in 2013 for $85 million. Parse is a very convenient way to store and retrieve data and that is the main reason many mobile developers was using it. You can think of it as Googles Firebase. But yesterday’s announcement made many developers around the world sad. Including me even if I am not a mobile developer. I was using Parse in personal Arduino projects and I always had it as an alternative in case I wanted to do a quick API test.

We have a difficult announcement to make. Beginning today we’re winding down the Parse service, and Parse will be fully retired after a year-long period ending on January 28, 2017. We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere.

We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.

First, we’re releasing a database migration tool that lets you migrate data from your Parse app to any MongoDB database. During this migration, the Parse API will continue to operate as usual based on your new database, so this can happen without downtime. Second, we’re releasing the open source Parse Server, which lets you run most of the Parse API from your own Node.js server. Once you have your data in your own database, Parse Server lets you keep your application running without major changes in the client-side code. For more details, check out our migration guide here.

We know that many of you have come to rely on Parse, and we are striving to make this transition as straightforward as possible. We enjoyed working with each of you, and we have deep admiration for the things you’ve built. Thank you for using Parse.